


Marion of the Greenwood

by fresne



Category: Twisted Princess (Disney Fanart)
Genre: Cat1, F/M, Yuletide 2013, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At Dawn's breathe, the May King, the green hooded Robin of the Wood, would come into the village with his laughing men. Villagers all of them. Loosely holding skins of Sack or Ale. They'd play Marion's favorite game, the game of Robin and Marion.</p><p>At Runnymede, she played a different game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marion of the Greenwood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Malkontent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malkontent/gifts).



When she was but a kit, Marion's Nurse, Nana, would wake Marion well before dawn to take her a Maying in the village below.

By wake, it must be understood that Marion was already well awake and dressed in her best clothes, having woken hours before close to gnawing off her paws in anticipation.

Nana would come in with a single candle of beeswax and lavender, and Marion would spring from her bed. Nana, who was a hedgehog of the Waverly Hedges, would have her venerable grey hairs brushed to a gleaming and already had bluebells threaded in a crown around her head. Marion would accept her own bluebell crown, which they'd made the day before and they would oh so quietly set off down into the courtyard and out past the sleepy guards at the gate to the village below.

In those days, Marion's parents were yet alive, but by silent consent, neither Nana nor Marion mentioned Maying to her parents. Maying was for the conquered Herbivores, not the Noble Carnivores who ruled.

Marion and Nana picked flowers as they went, and as they came to Loxley, Marion could barely contain herself. For there in the town square was the May pole. Marion and Nana would take up the same ribbon and the games would begin. At Dawn's breathe, the May King, the green hooded Robin of the Wood, would come into the village with his laughing men. Villagers all of them. Loosely holding skins of Sack or Ale. They'd play Marion's favorite game, the game of Robin and Marion.

It should perhaps be clear why this was her favorite game. Robin and his men would woo the May Queen, the villager who took the name Marion for the day. To Marion, the May Queen was always beautiful and the May King was always handsome. That this momentary King and Queen would steal away from the festivities and come nine months later this brought forth children was no part of Marion's understanding.

She was but a kit.

It was wonderful fun. Over too soon. She and Nana would walk back into the castle as if they had been but out for a walk and Marion would have to restrain herself to her lessons.

She was a kit still when she met Robin. They laughed to meet each other in the village on May Day. An actual Robin and an actual Marion. They chased each other around the maypole, and played at some childish version of May Day games.

She was a kit. Her parents were as yet hale and hearty. The troubles between the Plantagenets as yet did not appear as a haze upon her horizon.

She was on the cusp of vixenhood when her father died fighting for Henry in one of the King's wars with his wife, Queen Eleanor, and their prideful sons. Marion wasn't even sure who was fighting who or what side her father had been on. King Henry the elder or Young King Henry.

With her mother already dead the year before, Marion became the King's ward. Her estates were his for so long as she did not marry. That was when she was given Lady Kluck as a guardian to her virtue.

She could have told them that putting a chicken in charge of guarding a fox was a lost cause, but she did not. She was too much of a fox for that.

It was during this time that she learned the other use of the name Robin of the Greenwood. A name taken up by Murderers. Thieves. Traitors.

She'd had to stand by Queen Eleanor's side when a Pheasant, who had taken up the name of Robin and raised a Peasant's revolt, was publicly roasted. Days later she could still smell the burnt flesh and hear the Pheasant's pained calls as it was plucked and disemboweled before burning. Its flesh had been sent by messenger to the four corners of the kingdom as a warning to all who took up the hood of the Robin of the Greenwood.

She'd wondered which of the King's Earls had been forced to eat that charred meat.

She was enough of a fox to understand that this was a message for Queen Eleanor, who lashed her tail and said to King Henry, "If you wish to come at me, go for the throat. Don't nibble at my paws."

Fair Rosamund, a swan of surpassing beauty, preened at the gold chains of kingly favor at her clipped wings through all of this. Marion was enough of a fox to understand that too. It was later said that Queen Eleanor poisoned fair Rosamund, but Marion never believed it. If the stories had claimed a ripped out throat, she would have had no trouble imagining such a thing, but poison was something Sir Hiss and Prince John might do to eliminate the laying of alternative heirs. As if King Henry and Queen Eleanor hadn't laid down enough sons.

Marion kept her own counsel, while Lady Kluck fussed and worried at the scent of burnt feathers.

She went as if for entertainment when a Robin, who had taken the name of Robin of the Greenwood, his knees rich with green ribbons that made her think of nothing so much as May Day, was taken to the scaffold for riding the coach roads. He'd sung to the waiting crowds, bowed, and accepted the hangman's hood. As if for an entertainment.

She received word of the doings on her holdings. She did what she could to send back moneys for food. It was not as if she controlled the taxation on her own lands. She was at the King's whim.

She was there when King Richard, having survived his two elder brothers, said that he'd sell London itself if he could use it to pay for his crusade. Queen Eleanor had cuffed him lightly, but she laughed. She always laughed when her favorite said such things. She laughed and hunted him up the funds he needed. Marion knew, as they all knew, it was lionesses that did the hunting.

That King Richard was captured and imprisoned by the German Golden Eagle Emperor hardly mattered to Marion. She had no reason to care. What she cared about was the way Prince John squeezed the people, her people, for drops of blood for money, which he spent on wine and women.

It was with a fluttered heart that she saw her Robin, a fox in Sherwood green, take up the name of the Robin of the Greenwood. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor and it was like she was a kit again, and Robin wooed his Marion. She gave into his wooing with rather less than kit like behavior.

They were married too under some whim or guilt of King Richard's. Too bad he died laying siege to an anthill, and his brother Prince John then became King John, but a few months after the wedding.

Robin died like a sort of modern Saint Sebastian, riddled with the arrows he so loved to fire. Marion received only one arrow across the eye. Blinded there for her wisdom, she withdrew to the Greenwood with Skippy, who clutched his knife in his paw.

She did not take up the name of the hooded Robin of the Greenwood and rise up in rebellion. She did not put on Sherwood green.

She was a fox.

She was a Maid Marion, which was entirely a different thing than a Robin.

She stole from some of the rich and paid for trouble. She made allies of Marcher lords and disappeared with their connivance into the wild lands. She made a friend of the Earl of Pembroke, that venerable old Mastiff the Good Knight.

She made an archery butt of the Sheriff of Nottingham. She separated Sir Hiss from his head. She was troublesome and she was trouble. She was a Marion without her Robin, and the King was made to understand what that meant.

When the day came at Runnymede that the power of kings was constrained, she was not asked to press her paw to the vellum. She was but a vixen.

She could not have signed in any case.

She stood by with her bow drawn pointed squarely at the King.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


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